“How far is it from here?” Melissa asked.
Hale shrugged. “No more than a minute or two by car.”
“Show us,” Frank ordered.
CHAPTER 47
The first bullet zipped past Tim’s head, displacing the air inches from his left eye.
Before the introductory round smacked into the barn, five successive shots boomed out of the dark, kicking up dirt and hissing past at a heart-stopping proximity.
Everyone scattered, racing for cover. Tim was already facing the barn, but the open terrain between him and the doors would’ve made him an easy target. Instead, he ran to the right, toward a bank of old hen houses.
He glanced behind just long enough to catch a view of the gunman emerging from the forest. To his surprise he saw a man. Given all he’d been through, he’d expected to see another walking gestalt of mismatched garbage, something like the grass-monster from the church cul-de-sac. Regardless of the assailant’s human likeness, he knew the creature had arrived, just in another form, and that realization made his quest to reach Mallory all the more urgent.
Suddenly something sharp cut into Tim’s legs. He flipped forward, sailing off his feet, and slammed hard to the dirt, rolling painfully. At the edge of his awareness the scrape of metal on metal reached his ears. It accented each tumble and twist, and he quickly realized that while he’d been looking over his shoulder at the gunman, he’d run headlong into a sagging barbwire fence.
Sharp spikes bit into his shins and calves, ankles and knees. He looked down to discover he’d become entangled in the fall.
Footsteps crunched through the dry weeds. He craned his head to look behind him.
Thirty feet away, the killer strode past without even a glance.
After the sixth shot, the gunfire ceased, enabling the fleeing teens to reach safety before another assault. Troy, Chris, and Elsa all made it back into the barn unscathed, but upon their arrival, Mallory discovered that Becky, Adam, Lisa and Tim had become separated from them in the frantic rush to get away.
“Oh, God, where are the others?” Mallory cried.
“And my sister?” Derrick added.
They’d come to the edge of the loft, across from the trapdoor, miserably aware they’d become instant targets if they descended the ladder with the barn’s main doors standing open.
Chris’s breath came and went in quick bursts. “I think I saw them run for the cars.”
Elsa asked, “Who the hell is that? Why was he shooting at us?”
“I don’t know, and I don’t want to,” Troy huffed. “I say we find a back way out of this place and haul ass.”
“We can’t go without our friends,” Mallory snapped.
“Wanna bet!”
Chris peered around the door’s edge. A volley of lightning flashes flickered across the sky. “Oh, shit, he’s still coming,” he whispered. “We better do something fast.”
“Like what?” asked Elsa.
“The others are on their own,” Troy said.
“Shut the hell up,” Derrick hissed. “I’ve got an idea. I think we can take this fucker.” Pushing away from Mallory, he crossed the loft and grabbed hold of the armchair.
“What are you talking about?” she asked after him.
Without answering, he dragged the piece of furniture back to the loft’s ledge. “Okay, listen up,” he said, speaking quickly to the others. “You three grab some boards from the firewood pile, then go hide in the last two stables and wait for him—”
“Us?” Troy gasped.
Derrick made a fist at him. “Just listen, you idiot. There’s some furniture up here. We’ll wait for him to come through the doors then drop this chair on him. Once he’s down, you guys come out and beat the shit out of him.”
“Yeah, and what if you miss?” Chris challenged.
“We won’t miss,” Derrick snarled. “But even if we do, we’ll have distracted the asshole long enough for you three to take him by surprise.”
Mallory grimaced. “We don’t want to kill the guy.”
“Speak for yourself,” Troy replied.
“There’s not much time,” Derrick growled. “Now hide!”
Clad in an exoskeleton of flesh and bone, the entity marched forward, striding through the weeds toward where Mallory had taken refuge. The time for games was over. Too many people had become aware of its presence.
After departing from its encounter with Frank and the policewoman, it had returned to where it abandoned Judge Anderson’s van and took possession of his corpse, arming itself with the man’s revolver.
But now it tossed the empty firearm aside, along with a handful of extra ammunition. Conventional weapons were never its preferred instrument of destruction, and its skill in using them had already proved insufficient to meet its current needs.
Time was no longer on its side, either.
Instead, it decided to rely on its own assortment of powers in capturing Mallory and killing whoever tried to stop it.
The entity crossed the barn’s threshold and moved to where a crackling fire burned unattended just inside the main room.
It sensed her presence above it, detecting her glorious life force that churned like a near-bottomless reservoir of nurturing energy. Such a powerful reserve stood out like a nuclear fire in a starless void when compared to the others around her. It knew that three of the children hid near the back of the building, believing themselves to be cleverly concealed, much like Mallory and her friend above assumed their location was unknown.
Manipulating Anderson’s mouth into a wide smile, the entity directed its attention upward, to where the reward for its efforts waited.
Squinting like a frightened moviegoer in the grip of a horror film, Mallory watched the armchair drop into the gunman’s face, impacting at the precise moment he turned around and looked up.
It hit him dead-on, right in the head.
Mallory flinched.
It seemed absurd to be concerned for someone who’d just fired six bullets at her, but despite whatever hatred he harbored for her, she didn’t want to see someone get murdered. She wished they could’ve found something else to restrain him with, something less damaging, but Derrick had disagreed, having argued that the chair was the only piece of furniture besides the couch that could incapacitate the gunman long enough for them to escape. But what if he’d miscalculated? What would happen to her and the others if the man died?
But the chair
He staggered a few steps to the side from the impact, then regained his balance and angled his eyes upward again, looking right at her. His pale skin adopted the orange light of the fire when he stepped closer to the flames, and his cloudy eyes looked like twin blisters on an enormous burn.
Then she saw the blood.
It didn’t glisten in the firelight, as if caused by the chair, but it coated his shirt, neck, and chin in a frightening
